A weblog for professionals in electrical, electronic, mechanical and software engineering with content provided by the members of the Long Island Consultant's Network.

September 2013

September 26, 2013

I am now studying the northern end of the Gulf of California as a likely location for solar-heated evaporation rafts. Remember that I have a design that looks like it will work by heating the thin layer of water above the submerged solar absorber plates that are kept at the chosen depth by floats that protrude through the water surface. To see how I got to the outlet of the Colorado River let's review all the other locations that I have considered. The solar-heated evaporator raft idea was originally conceived as a remedy for inadequate orographic rainfall, where moist air is pushed up over mountains, encounters reduced atmospheric pressure, expands, cools, and water vapor condenses. The thought was that the rafts, located in coastal waters, could lower the dew point sufficiently, so that the condensate would form droplets heavy enough to precipitate. This would supply water to people living at high altitudes, with the excess supplying people who live at lower altitudes along streams and rivers. Vapor transport to high altitudes overcomes the cost and power demands of desalination at sea level and pumping the product to higher altitudes. An example would be the Arabian Sea off the western coast of the Indian peninsula. The summer monsoon winds rise up over the Western Ghats but sometimes leave little rain on the Deccan Plateau. The poor farmers just watch the silvery clouds passing overhead. A little extra water vapor supplied by evaporator rafts might trigger rainfall.

The 2012 drought in the central plains of the U.S. shifted my attention closer to home. There is little orographic rainfall here. The moist air is lifted by convection, resulting in thunderstorms, and possibly tornadoes. I thought of increasing the convection by laying black plastic film solar absorbers on the ground, but that would increase the damage and loss of life from storms. I could see that this was getting out-of-hand when I suggested that a monstrous multi-state system of absorbers might spread out and weaken the storms when I did not understand how absorbers in fixed discreet locations would interact with air masses moving over them due to wind. Furthermore, the proposed location of rafts along the Texas - Louisiana coast would increase the summertime humidity, which is already excessive. And then we had flooding in Missouri in 2013. Enough already! Move on.

I noticed that the wind direction was often from the Pacific into San Francisco Bay. How about rafts in the relatively calm water of the bay? After some study and observation, I could not see what good they would do, so I dropped this location. But it got me thinking about the headwaters of the Sacramento River, which seems to have adequate flow. But the Colorado River does not. Could some of the abundant Columbia River system be evaporated and sent to the Colorado River watershed? This raises the question of whether you are robbing one system without sufficient benefit to the recipient system. And then we had the torrential rains and flooding on the eastern side of the Continental Divide. The headwaters for the Colorado River is on the western side of the divide, so apparently no benefit. But a warning to not mess around with stuff you don't understand.

So now I'm observing the wind and rainfall in the desert area at the outlet of the Colorado River into the Gulf of California. There is little discharge because the Colorado River supplies the Imperial Valley irrigation via the All American Canal. Maybe the rafts can do some good here. At least the ocean would supply the water.

September 22, 2013

Do you remember the IBM 370 computers? They were all the
rage circa 1975 when my wife, Judy, was working at this particular business office
in Manhattan. Her boss at the time was Richie.

Judy's desk was just a short distance away from the company computer's
position. Therefore, she could hear all kinds of sounds from all kinds of
things that were happening inside the cabinets.

One day, some of those sounds suddenly underwent a change
and she said so, but good old Richie wasn't listening to any of that.

Richie's attitude was that since Judy was not somebody with
technical training, she obviously knew nothing about how the IBM 370 worked and
so she couldn't possibly be hearing or noticing anything important. To him,
only those in the anointed circle, those who were blithely blessed with the
arcane Word, had anything of significance or value to contribute to the business'
day by day, highly computerized events.

Well, I think you can guess what happened next, right?

After a few days following the change of sound, there ensued
a head crash. One hard drive was utterly destroyed and panic was the order of
the day. The IBM people came in and when Judy happened to mention to one of the
technicians what she'd heard, he was very interested to hear all about it.

Of course nobody ever admitted to anything. Judy was never exonerated for having expressed
her observational report, but we, meaning you and yours truly, know what
the truth really was.

September 21, 2013

It has been my happy task these last however many years to
prepare and distribute monthly publicity announcements for meetings and
lectures at The IEEE Consultants Network of Long Island (LICN).

I keep a long checklist of announcement destinations. First,
there is my own e-mail list of over three hundred persons. I also send
publicity releases to our local newspaper, Newsday, to Long Island Business
News, to the NYC/LI sections, to the Long Island Forum for Technology, to the IEEE
Long Island Section Calendar of Events and so on. In short, the LICN publicity
materials go to a lot of places.

I'm quite certain that the requirements I run into when
distributing LICN materials would be the same requirements for doing publicity work
for any other organization. Although each publicity venue has its own
requirements and limitations, many of which overlap, there is one requirement
which is absolutely universal: Brevity. Unfortunately however, when I
ask each lecturer the title of his/her presentation, sometimes I'm given titles
of enormous length.

To make clear what I mean, imagine a title like this:
"Introduction to the Fundamentals of Warp Drive Design with Dilithium
Calibration Vectors and Spacetime Rectification". Now imagine having to
put this title plus the date plus the time plus the place plus the name of the
presenter plus the presenter's business affiliation or town of origin plus my
own name as point of contact plus my own telephone number into an announcement
of no more than two hundred characters. Impossible!

Some lecturers just don't get it when I tell them I need a
short, even terse, title. This title for this hypothetical lecture could come
down to just three words: "Warp Drive Design", but I have encountered
lecturers who would be horrified at this compression and who would earnestly seek
to persuade me as to how inappropriate it would be to omit all of the
descriptive phrasing they'd provided.

September 18, 2013

GM is developing an electric car that can go 200 miles on a charge and sell for about $30,000. Clearly they see this as a “family car” which top management of GM has said is their corporate objective. Tesla has promoted their Model S as a “family car”. Doug Parks, GM’s vice president of global products programs, disclosed the effort this past Monday at GM’s battery laboratory and test facility in Warren, Michigan. It didn’t say when the car would be available. He said the technology is available now, but the cost of the necessary batteries is still too high. Author’s comment: “Economy of Scale” should drive battery pack costs down to about ½ present levels.

A QUESTION---Do you think that the public is ready to accept a 200 mile range EV as THE family car? Apparently GM and Tesla think the answer is yes. Except for battery cost the car will be less complex than either a conventional OR a PHV Hybrid hence the production cost will be significantly less—good for the customer.

GM’s move to raise the profile of its battery research efforts comes as Tesla is challenging the established auto industry’s claim to technology leadership with $70,000 and up Model S. Mr. Parks’ comments came just a few days after Germany’s VOKSWAGEN AG said it intended to become the largest seller of electric vehicles by 2018. Analysts and industry executives say Tesla, GM, VW and the current global electric vehicles sales leader, NISSSAN MOTOR CO., all face the same problem: current electric vehicles batteries are TOO expensive, and deliver TOO little usable driving range compared with vehicles powered by ICEs. The number of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles for sale in the US has more than quadrupled to 15 different make vehicles since 2010 as auto makers roll out new models to comply with government mandates. BUT sales for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles account for less than half of 1% of the overall market, despite price cuts, discounted leases and government tax incentives that can add up to as much as $12,500 per vehicle depending upon the state.

GM has sold nearly 15,000 of its battery powered Chevrolet VOLT cars this year through August, aided by incentives and discounts. The VOLT’s extended range comes from a gasoline engine (ICE) that can recharge the battery. Nissan’s approach it to argue that extending the range of electric vehicles to 200 miles isn’t worth it because most people don’t drive farther in a day than Nissan’s LEAF’S 75 miles of electric range. The LEAF costs $28,000 in the US before federal tax credits. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said recently that “it didn’t require a miracle” to sell a 200-mile range electric car for around $35,000 in the next three or four years.

Kevin Gallagher, a chemist and researcher at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, said auto makers are spending about $500 per kilowatt hour of battery capacity. That means the 24 kwh pack on the Nissan Leaf would cost around $12,500. Last year Ford CEO Alan Mulally said the battery for the FOCUS EV was 23 kwh of energy csota between $13,000 and $15,000. Tesla Chief Technical Officer JB Straubel says the company’s battery costs are half or even a quarter of the price of industry average, partly because of the company’s strategy to thousands of commodity battery casing rather than the specialized batteries that GM and Nissan. These cells are what are called extended C cells being the same diameter but about 3/8” longer.

P.T. Barnum is credited, I think, with the following line: "First you tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, then you tell 'em, then you tell 'em what you told 'em." I may have this wrong, perhaps I've unknowingly paraphrased it, but the embodied advice is unmistakably clear.

On Tuesday, the following e-mail, here purged of anything personally identifiable, came to me. It was a reminder for a seminar I had wanted to attend. Study it carefully for moment and then read on.

You will note that this reminder does not say where the event will be held nor does it say at what time the event will be held. The author unwisely assumes that I already know those things from a prior e-mail exchange.

Unfortunately, I did not know those two parameters as somehow or other, I could not find the earlier e-mail exchange in my computer. Perhaps I inadvertantly deleted it. I just don't know.

The proper form of this reminder would have been to inlcude all of the salient details, even if they had been sent before.

"The mission of LinkedIn is to connect the world's professionals to enable
them to be more productive and successful."

LinkedIn clearly fails in satisfaction of this sentence.

Consider merely four of the LinkedIn groups of which I am a member and the
number of members in each:

Electrical Engineers World 20009 Members
The Official IEEE Group 27093 Members
RF and Microwave Community 18922 Members
Analog Mixed-Signal and RF IC Design 12876 Members
----------------------
Sum of these four groups alone: 78900 Members

My readership in these four groups alone, allowing for some commonality, is
plausibly in excess of
seventy-thousand individuals. I had been receiving much favorable response to
my postings to these and many other groups until LinkedIn's so called
"Quality Control Filter", an unpublicized factor at LinkedIn,
inappropriately brought my work almost entirely to a halt.

Your threshold for the "Quality Control Filter" is only seven group
managers, each of whom in my case objected to some technical issue that I chose
to discuss. Those discussions included the disadvantages of Radio Frequency
Identification Devices, the properties of semiconductor diodes and several other technical
topics of widespread interest.

So far too, forty-seven of my essays are available on line via EDN Magazine,
one of the premiere electronics industry periodicals while another two-hundred
and seventy-two essays appear on the website of The IEEE Consultants Network of
Long Island. My work has also appeared in print forty-three times.

In one case, we take note that the manager of one group who passed judgment on
my work had the
sole professional qualification of "Wedding Officiant" with no
engineering training whatsoever.

One might perhaps argue a case for your "Quality Control Filter" at
some higher number of complainants, perhaps twenty, perhaps forty, perhaps some
other number. However, a threshold of only seven makes a complete mockery of
your mission statement.

I want restoration of normal group access. How LinkedIn will accomplish that, I
cannot predict, but it is necessary.

September 16, 2013

The battles over the new Taxi, the NV200, like many of Mayor Bloomberg’s taxi industry fights, have led to a rash of unintended consequences. IN 2007, Mayor Bloomberg tried to compel the taxi owners to switch to hybrid cars in a bid to make the taxi fleet more fuel efficient. The taxi owners rebelled and fought in court to prove that the Mayor Bloomberg and indeed the NYC could not mandate fuel efficiency of taxis (or other livery type vehicles) and hence in the new taxi competition he could NOT mandate that they be hybrid. What follows demonstrates that “You can’t keep a good idea down forever”.

Some of the same medallion owners have since come to embrace hybrid car technology and want to see it made part of the specification for the selected NV200-----a complete “about face”. For the two years that hybrid cabs such as the Ford Escape, the owners did realize considerable fuel savings and as Bloomberg claimed for operation on a 2-shift basis the fuel savings did approach $10,000 per year, per vehicle. The cars are attractive to owner/drivers, because the efficiency translates to less money spent on fuel and hence more take-home pay. In a defacto competition Nissan won with the NV200 with a conventional drive as was then mandated.

And the TLC (Taxi and Limousine Commission) says the same court decision that blocked its hybrid mandate prevented it from using gas mileage as a criterion in the selection of the taxi replacement. Ultimately this replacement has been the Nissan NV200. Nissan has agreed to begin designing a hybrid version of the NV200 earlier this year (2013).

“It’s not an easy thing to fix after the fact.” said the manager of Global Power Train at LMC Automotive, an auto industry intelligence firm.” It’ll cost Nissan extra money of course but it is something that is possible and feasible. The power train of the vehicle is the most expensive element, for commercial vehicles and fleet owners for Nissan of North America. Nissan is in early stages of designing the hybrid based upon components of hybrid version of their Altima.

The TLC and Nissan have suggested that the entire fleet could eventually be converted to all-electric using components for the Nissan Leaf. But taxi owners are skeptical that for 12-hour shift operation there will not be enough time available to recharge the vehicle batteries and provide continuous service. They further opine that the required high output chargers will be expensive and require extensive engineering to be reliable. Reliability IS the key issue.

Some change was inevitable for the taxi industry. Both the Crown Victoria and the Escape Hybrid, the two most common taxi models have ended production, meaning the fleet owners have to decide on a new vehicle when they replace their cabs. If Nissan can deliver NV200 at the rate of 220 per month it will take at least 5 years to just replace the existing fleet. With the elections coming up in November, it is possible the Bloomberg’s selection will be delayed even further and in fact a new administration could call for a DO—OVER. Neither candidate seems disposed to back the completely logical hybrid version of the NV200 before the election.

September 13, 2013

You might be acquainted with Samuel Beckett's play
"Waiting for Godot". It's considered a classic. It's about two
unfortunate individuals who wait in vain for the arrival of Godot. "He's
coming!" they intone. In reference to that work, when sometimes I need to
catch a bus someplace and it doesn't show up on time, I envision that I am waiting
for services by the Godot Bus Lines.

Waiting per se has many other aspects in our daily lives. Ask
any husband whose wife is shopping for clothes while he holds her coat and
pocketbook.

For another example, consider a doctor's waiting room.

There I am waiting for my turn and looking for something to
read to while away the time. What do I find? A copy or two of "Good
Housekeeping", a copy of "Elle" or "Redbook", a month
old copy of "TV Guide" and approximately twenty or thirty copies of
"WebMD" in which I can read about other people's miseries while I
suffer my own.

A copy of "The New Yorker"? Now and then. A copy
of "New York" or "Time" or "Popular Photography"
or even "Motor Trend"? On occasion. Usually though, the reading
selection has been carefully culled of anything that might somehow hold my
interest.

I got a huge kick out of the Star Trek, The Next Generation
story in which Data tries to see if a pot of water takes longer to come to a
boil if watched versus when it is not watched. With his infinite patience to
wait while testing this question, he concludes that waiting and watching make
no difference. My problem with that was, how could he know how long it took an
unwatched pot to boil if he wasn't watching it?

September 12, 2013

I once worked at this particular company that supplied
avionics items to major military aircraft company customers. Our products were
physically small, but oh MAN, were they ever complex. A great deal of
design effort went into those things and so eventually, sample units needed to
be shipped to the customer for evaluation. When that was done, we'd get back their
commentary some of which told us we'd done this or that well and some of which
said that this or that didn't work to their satisfaction. This was nothing
unusual or difficult. It was just a normal part of the product development
process.

Often, a unit would be sent out, the customer would test it,
they'd ship it back to us and that's where our problems arose. When being
shipped back to us, weeks could go by without delivery. Where in
heaven's name did that stuff get to?? There were multi-million dollar contracts
involved with hard deadlines to meet and we weren't getting our return
shipments in a timely manner.

We found out why.

Incoming deliveries had to come to our loading dock, to our
receiving department, and what we found was that as items would arrive, they
would be hidden away by staff members of that department. When anyone
confronted the manager of that department about these delays in delivery, he
would become very spiteful and dismissive, saying that every item received had
to be "processed". Furthermore, at least in my case, I got told that my
attitude about delivery was inappropriate which would mean that I would personally
have to wait a few weeks longer for "processing" to happen.

I didn't feel singled out by this abuse. It turned out that
it was happening to pretty much everyone in the company.

At the time, there was a "Quality" improvement
program in place (sort of) and suggestions were invited to be submitted. I did
so. I outlined the above problem and then suggested that an "Engineering
Cognizance" sign-off be implemented so that contract critical items would
get to the proper engineering staff expeditiously and I cc'ed this suggestion
all over the place.

Other engineers very quickly sent their own supportive e-mails
to the Quality executive (He had a much snappier title than that but I can't
remember what it was.) and lo and behold, incoming shipment delays stopped
happening. My sign-off suggestion wasn't adopted, but there were no more delays
of incoming delivery,

Unfortunately, that improvement only lasted a couple of
months. The Quality executive retired, he was not replaced and the whole
situation then reverted back to what it had been.

Why was this continuing to happen? I don't think my opinion
would be considered politically correct, but I do hold it to be true in my own
estimation.

The guy in charge at incoming was of an ethnic minority
group and, I think, poorly educated. I would imagine he would have been pretty
much unemployable in most businesses. Although the problems that he caused were
known to one and all throughout the company, I think that the company's top
management feared that if they tried to discipline this guy or if they discharged
him altogether, there would ensue charges of ethnic discrimination with all of
the headaches that would entail. His position was thereby protected so he felt
free to exercise and abuse his positional power over anyone who had to depend
on his department's services.

I mentioned this situation to a colleague some years ago who
recognized it from his own observations. He said it was a case of "the
janitor running the company".